If you hang around SEO peepz, chances are you have overheard conversations on “how to increase Page Authority”. But what exactly does the term stand for and why is it important?
What is Page Authority?
Page authority is a metric that estimates the likelihood of your page appearing in the search results when users search for specific keywords.
The term, created by the folks over at Moz, is measured by a score ranging from 1 to 100 with 100 being the highest score attainable.
Of course, you don’t need to assign a specific number to your web page to understand Page Authority, or to put it to good use.
What you need to understand is that the higher your Page Authority, the better your chances of ranking in search engine results pages.
Simply put, if Google or other search engines believe that your page’s content is of high quality and relevant to that particular search, your page authority will be high.
Why is Page Authority Important?
Isn’t it obvious? It’s all about ranking. Search engine results that appear on page one receive all the traffic of a particular keyword search.
As such, if you want decent traffic to your web pages, you need the best possible search engine ranking. And in order to rank you will need, among others, a better Page Authority.
How to Increase Page Authority?
Are you wondering how to increase Page Authority? We have compiled a list of actionable tips you can take right now:
Know Your Competitors
Like it or not, pages that are ranking higher than yours are currently earning better page authority. You have to figure out what they are doing to get there, and do those things better. Click the top-ranked results for the keywords you want to optimize for and try to find answers to the following questions:
- What keywords are they using?
- What questions are being answered?
- How long is the content?
- What sources are they using?
Once you are able to answer those, you can determine what you should focus on, use visuals, and simply create better quality content than that which is already ranking.
Focus on Your Domain as Well as Your Pages
Domain authority(DA) is similar to Page Authority. However, it reflects the overall authority of your entire website.
When your domain authority goes up, that boosts the overall authority of each of your pages.
Domain Authority in many cases is the answer to the question “how to increase Page Authority”. To build your Domain Authority, focus on each of the individual tips provided here:
- Use internal linking strategically.
- Write great content.
- Disavow bad links.
- Fix performance issues and broken links on your site.
- Get rid of duplicate content.
- Make sure your pages are mobile friendly.
- Keep your sitemap up to date.
- Create a site structure that is clean and easy to navigate. In other words, don’t look at your site from the POV of a search engine. Instead, look at it from the POV of a person. Is your site easy to navigate from all devices? Does it contain information that’s relevant to your target audience?
Build Links to The Pages You Want to Optimize
Link building is the cornerstone of good SEO, and it’s mandatory for building Page Authority. Use any and all white hat techniques for increasing the number of backlinks to the pages you want to optimize. Here are a few of the many techniques highlighted:
- Look for mentions of your web pages, tools, or products. Ask the webmaster to adjust his link to redirect to a page that currently has a low Page Authority.
- Reach out to suppliers and distributors for links.
- Create a blogroll linking to other relevant blogs. Most bloggers will reciprocate.
- Add your pages to local directories and claim ownership of listings.
- Create video tutorials and “how-to” content, linking that in relevant discussion forums.
- Write Guest Posts for other, niche-related websites.
- Create the kind of content that people want to link. Some examples of these are: list articles, infographics, and videos.
- Link to reputable and reliable sources within your content. Remember that authoritative, thought leadership content is most likely to earn backlinks. Keep your focus on current content as well. If you’ve got pages with stale content, rewrite that content with fresh ideas and insights.
Dive Deep And Make it Interesting
If your content is repetitive or thin, there’s no reason for anyone else to link it. As a general rule, people want to link to content that dives deeper into a specific topic than they are able to.
Why am I saying this? Well, as I already mentioned, your Page Authority depends highly on the backlinks that link to it.
To do this, you will need to create content that attracts links.
Linkbait content, as its most commonly referred to, tends to have a single focus point. It explores every aspect of a given topic. It also provides case studies and examples.
When someone finishes reading such content, they should feel as if they are now familiar with a topic, and they can take action based on what they have learned.
The length of your content is also an important consideration. Unfortunately, this is where things can get a bit complicated.
Nobody really knows the ideal length for content to earn a backlink or to rank high in search engine results. As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to write at least 1800 words per piece of content to make it look thorough enough and worth of placing.
Optimize Your On-Page Content For Readability
It isn’t just the content of your pages that matters. The formatting, readability, and visual appeal matters as well. Reader-friendly SEO content is what keeps people engaged in consuming your page.
If that doesn’t happen, they aren’t going to link to it and, as a result, your Page Authority will not increase.
For starters, if it hasn’t been made clear already, your site must be mobile friendly. Aside from that, there are many other things that you can do to optimize your content for readability. These include:
- Use visuals to make the content interesting to look at in addition to being more informative.
- Use subheadings, bulleted lists, and numbered lists. These break up content and make your pages easy to scan.
- Allow enough white space between written content, to make paragraphs more scannable.
- Choose fonts and background colors that are pleasing to the eye.
- Use block quotes to make important remarks stand out.
Fix Page Performance Issues
Pinterest increased the traffic to their site from Google when they decreased their perceived performance lag by 40%.
When your page loads slowly, or has other performance issues, your bounce rates increase and your traffic decreases. Both result in lowered Page Authority.
Analyze your low authority pages to be sure that poor performance isn’t a factor. If it is, you can take the following steps:
- Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to get an overview of your loading speed.
- Reduce the size of your images.
- Allow browsers to load the cached version of your site
- Use GZip Compression
- Work with your web hosting provider to identify and fix any slowdowns
Promote Your Content
You have a much better chance of earning links if people know who you are, and are aware of your content. This begins with networking. Reach out to influencers and other bloggers.
Take time to find their best pieces of content and share them. Follow them on social media and try to get to know them; you can even subscribe to relationship-based link building services to simplify things. There’s a lot of link building that is based on relationships and reciprocation.
Then, when you publish new content, let them know. Kindly ask them to share your content and with a bit of luck, you will be getting lots of traffic your way.
Update Your Content to Get The Attention of Search Engine Spiders
You can maintain existing Page Authority, and even increase it by updating the content of your pages.
Each time you add new content to increase its length or modify existing content to optimize it for SEO, Google re-indexes your page. This can lead to improving your ranking for specific keywords.
The good news here is that you don’t have to make significant changes for this to occur. Simply adding an image with a caption will trigger this action.
This is also a great way to leverage user-generated content. Post user reviews, testimonials, pictures, and videos to your site. You’ll boost your Page Authority without having to go through the entire content creation process.
Remove or Disavow Links That Bring Down Your Page’s Reputation
Not all links help you increase your Page Authority. Even though you cannot control who will link your content, or where, your readers will judge you by those links. And so will Google.
Imagine that, for some reason one of your pages has been linked to by several non-reputable sites.
There are a few things that can happen here, and none of them are good. First, before content creators link to your posts, many will research you and your website.
If they find links to your site from low reputation websites, they aren’t going to give you backlinks.
In addition to this, not only will Google penalize bad websites, they can issue a manual penalty to your site just for being associated with a disreputable website.
In either case, you can lose any of the benefits of having good links to your website.
That is where knowing how to remove bad backlinks comes in handy. You can use a backlink tracking tool like Linkody, to discover links to your pages.
From there, you can look for links with irrelevant anchor text, links from websites that you don’t want to be associated with, or unnatural sitewide links.
Once you know where those links are, you can take action. You can ask webmasters to remove the links to your pages or make them NoFollow. If that doesn’t work, you can use Google’s tool to disavow such links.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve made it this far you’ve got a pretty good idea of how to increase Page Authority. Your content will be more authoritative, you’ll earn a backlink from reputable sources, and you will improve the overall user experience.
So, before taking action, here is a quick summary of all the tips we talked about.
- Know your competitors
- Use internal links from high authority pages to boost low authority pages
- Focus on your domain as well as your pages
- Build links to the pages you want to optimize
- Dive deep and make it interesting
- Optimize your on-page content for readability
- Fix page performance issues
- Promote your content
- Update your content to get the attention of search engine spiders
- Remove or disavow links that bring down your page’s reputation
Jot them down or learn them by heart and go take action. It’s time to increase your Page Authority!
Author’s bio.
Angela Baker is a self-driven specialist who is currently working as a freelance writer at TrustMyPaper writing services and is trying to improve herself and her blogging career. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth and is convinced that it’s always important to broaden horizons. That’s why Angela develops and improves her skills throughout the writing process to help to inspire people.